Airtime 2.0.2, our free open source radio automation software, is out today and it's quicker than ever.
While we were fixing some vital bug reports from the community, we took the opportunity to optimise the calendar, dashboard and Now Playing page. The result? Your favourite open source radio automation software is now more stable and more responsive than ever. Airtime is free to download (and always will be), runs on Ubuntu and Debian, and users can interact with it through any web browser.
Airtime Pro, is our hosted version of the software. It aims to make things easier and quicker still by taking care of installation, set-up, upgrades, security updates, server maintenance and worldwide technical support. We've just halved the price of hosting and there's a month's free trial on offer over at sourcefabric.com.
We’ve been benchmarking! Airtime’s Calendar display speed is now twice as fast, the dashboard is twice as fast and the Now Playing page is up to six times faster. In addition we sorted a couple of issues with the playout engine, worked on improving the show recorder and dealt with an filename upgrade issue affecting those trying to upgrade from 1.8.2. The full changelog is here.
And, just to jog your memory, here’s what’s new in the 2.0.x series in general...
You can now have up to three streams with different bitrates and point them to different Icecast/SHOUTcast servers. Any connection problems between Liquidsoap and Icecast are shown in the interface (no more blaming Airtime for your misconfigured Icecast server!)
First up, the playlist now expands as you add items instead of keeping everything within a small scrolled box.. There's better error checking in cases where two users alter the same data at the same time now too. We removed the intermediate "Add Playlist" screen where it asked you to fill in the name and description of the playlist. This wasnt necessary since everything could be changed from the playlist editor itself. And finally, you can now right-click on an item in the library to see the metadata for the audio file.
Ability to change the day a week starts on. Your view settings are now saved in the calendar (time scale and time increments) and playlists (number of items displayed, search term), so when you browse away and return, they'll be remembered.
Airtime's native integration with SoundCloud just got better! You can now upload any clip to SoundCloud (not just the recorded shows as it was in previous versions), upload many files at once, view the file on soundcloud.com once it is uploaded, re-upload a file (for example, if the file has been edited) and automatically set the file to be downloadable.
Change the hardware output API from within your browser! You can now switch between ALSA, OSS, AO, Pulseaudio, and Portaudio, all via the user interface!
You can now listen to your streams directly from the web interface without having to start a third party application (such as VLC). Gotta love this...
Configure time zone can now be set in the browser. Times are now stored in the database in UTC time, there is no more need to adjust server time or values stored in ".htaccess" or "php.ini" files. Woo-hoo! Another thing we moved to the browser was service monitoring. You can now see easily the status of the services and the disk space available.
The Media Monitor is also much improved. It now correctly handles the case where a watched directory or subdirectory is deleted or moved. We also fixed a very rare bug where Airtime import could start reading a file before it had finished copying, leading to import failure.
Airtime 2.0 features protection against brute-force password guessing attacks: after three failed login attempts, the user will be presented with a RECAPTCHA.
We've improved a lot of small things relating to entering information into Airtime (only allowing valid inputs, removing a few unnecessary 'required' fields). We also added a friendly 404 page design and a small indicator as to whether you have the most recent version installed.
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